After the supper the dishes waited. The wife said: “Now we will have
the poetry.” I said in my heart, “Maybe this is the one house in a
hundred where the seed of these verses will be sown upon good ground.”
We went into the parlor, distinguished as such by the battered organ.
The mother had Frank and Jimmy sit in semicircle with her and big
Frank, while I plunged into my rhymed appeal. After the dynamite of the
day I did not hesitate to let loose the thunders. I did not hesitate to
pause and expound:--the poem being, as I have before described, many
stanzas on heroes of history, with the refrain, ever and anon: _God
help us to be brave._ No, kind and flattering reader, it was not above
their heads. Earnestness is earnestness everywhere. The whole circle
grasped that I really expected something unusual of those boys with the
black-diamond eyes, no matter what kind of perversity was in them at
present.
I said, in so many words, as a beginning, that nitro-glycerine was not
the only force in the world, that there is also that dynamite called
the power of the soul, and that detonation called fame.
But I did not dwell long upon my special saints, Francis of Assisi
and Buddha, nor those other favorites who some folk think contradict
them: Phidias and Michael Angelo. I dwelt on the strong: Alexander,
Cæsar, Mohammed, Cromwell, Napoleon, and especially upon the lawgivers,
Confucius, Moses, Justinian; and dreamed that this ungoverned strength
before me, that had sprung from the loins of King Coal, might some day
climb high, that these little wriggling, dirty-fisted grandsons of
that monarch might yet make the world some princely reparation for his
crimes.
After the reading the mother and father said solemnly, “it is a good
book.”
Then the wife showed the other two pieces of printed matter in the
household, a volume of sermons, and a copy of _The House of a Thousand
Candles_. You have read that work about the candles. The sermons were
by the Reverend Wood M. Smithers. You do not know the Reverend Mister
Smithers? He has collected in one fair volume all the sermons that ever
put you to sleep, an anthology of all those discourses that are just
alike.
She said she had read them over and over again to the family. I
believed it. There was butter on the page. I said in my heart: “She is
not to be baffled by any phraseology. If she can get a kernel out of
Wood M. Smithers, she will also derive strength from my rhyme.”
She promised she would have each of the boys pick out one of the
twenty-six great men for a model, as soon as they were schooled enough
to choose. She put the poem in the kitchen table drawer, where she kept
some photographs of close relatives, and I had the final evidence that
I had become an integral part of the family tradition.
V